We're happy to announce that we have now deployed a version of the Creative Commons license for use across Maneno. While all aspects of www.maneno.org are covered in the license, individual blogs have the choice of using the license or not which is controllable in the blog admin section for users who are logged in.

Let's back up a couple of steps though and talk about why this is important by first asking: What is Creative Commons? Creative Commons (or CC) is born of the "copy left" movement which means that they work to release broad copyright licenses focused more on providing replicable access to works as opposed to shutting them off to replication as previous copyright laws did. Basically, instead of having to write up a legal agreement for everything you do, you can apply a CC license based on how many rights you wish to retain and how many you wish to release. In a nutshell, these are licenses for the digital age where everything is infinitely reproducible.

These licenses are a great thing to come about, but they have a couple of problems which we are working with at Maneno and I talked about at the Creative Commons Salon. The first is the linguistic problem. As you can see, this license exists in a great many languages. We are working to have more translations based on the African languages that Maneno has available. That problem is the easy one and should be dealt with in time.

The bigger problem is that for these licenses to be enforceable, they have to have be legally ported for each country in the world as each country has different laws. Given this map, you can see the problem we face given the geographic focus of Maneno. With the exception of South Africa, there are no other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with a CC agreement in place. So, technically there would seem to be no point in having these licenses on Maneno. Why did we do this then?

We did this to try and spread CC licenses to more languages so that not only do these languages have more traction on the internet, but so that CC also has more traction in these languages. We are hoping that this will then lead to the more important step of these licenses being ported to these countries. It's a chicken and egg problem wherein we're hoping that the more exposure Maneno gets in these countries, the more exposure CC will get, and both will gain a gradual foothold for the blogging communities of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The primary agreement we have deployed with links to the various translations of it is the Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported. We chose this license as it is a very protective one once implemented in a country. Also, as far as we know, specific country licenses supersede the unported version, so even though someone in say Zambia opts to use this license on their Maneno blog, their works are protected in a full legal sense in somewhere like the United States which has ported the license to the country properly. The license we chose is one of many options that CC offers. If people wish to choose others, let us know and we'll see what we can do to make this happen.

In the end, it's all about creating better access for Maneno bloggers to tools which should be shared globally.

Last week Maneno participated in the San Francisco Creative Commons Salon as we are in the process of deploying Creative Commons licenses to Maneno blogs for the authors choosing. The CC Salons, which take place in more than 15 different cities around the world, are open forums for people who are interested in global participatory culture, and are usually focused on building a community of artists and developers around Creative Commons.

In this Salon, that took place on April 15th at the coworking space PariSoMa, we presented Maneno to a diverse audience that seemed to be quite excited about what we are trying to achieve. We talked about how African bloggers are largely not part of the conversation about Africa, and about the skewed portrayal of Africa in mainstream media as shown by comparing the coverage of Europe and Africa on any given day on a random news outlet. Because of that we wanted to make blogging a lot easier for Sub-Saharan bloggers with a platform like Maneno, as well as promoting their content for greater exposure.

This brought us to what makes it different from other existing blogging platforms, which is a question we always get when introducing Maneno to any audience. So we described the the technicalities of Maneno and how well it works in slow internet environments. People seemed very interested in our upcoming feature that will allow blogging through a mobile phone either via SMS or MMS, since in Sub-Saharan Africa a lot more people have phones than internet access.

We also talked about the multilingual nature of the platform, of course, as it is something that is very important for use. There are over 2,000 languages Sub-Saharan Africa, but sadly most of them have little or no internet presence. Also, having realized the big divide that exists between African bloggers that write in different languages, we wanted to make it easy for authors and readers to translate interesting posts in more than one language. In this day and age, with the globalization of internet, there is a danger of linguistic isolation which we'd like to avoid by bridging the gap between different language bloggers.

At the end of our presentation many people wanted to know more, and so we answered quite a few questions. One that we've been getting quite a bit and that we find a little amusing every time is about what would African bloggers write about. It reminds us of that talk that Kenyan businesswoman Jane Arunga gave in a conference about aid evaluation, in which she explained how somebody in the US had asked her something like "Africans Have Cell Phones? Who Do They Call?". In case our answer isn't obvious, we said that we expect African bloggers to write about the same things that bloggers in North America or Europe write about: what's important for them.

Alongside Maneno, two other projects that are global in reach were also presented at the CC Salon. Although they both have the word Global in their news and are both focused on video, after listening to them we realized they are actually quite different. Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee presented Global Oneness, that offers a library of short films as educational or advocacy materials, and David Harris presented Global Lives that is filming 10 people from different countries around the world for 24 hours straight to screen them simultaneously in a dome-shaped, Burning Man-esque video installation. Check them out, they are quite cool.

If you want to see some more pictures of the event, we have uploaded them on our Flickr photostream.